01.2018

 

Turning to the substance behind OkCupid user profiles, W+K subverted a dirty digital dating acronym into a rallying cry for modern romance. The campaign aimed to shift conversation about dating culture, empowering the individual to interpret “DTF” to reflect what they wanted from dating.

 

(?) Press
(?) Press

While once the go-to for young daters, OkCupid was losing ground with the rise of apps like Tinder, and in danger of being relegated to “the dating app I used to use.” Our challenge was to reconnect the powerful platform to a young audience, specifically young women. To do so we took one for the team and immersed ourselves in the world of modern dating, and we found that while our audience made use of digital/mobile dating apps when looking for love (or whatever), the overall experience of using those apps left a lot to be desired.

Built around a more single-minded mechanic, other apps offered up dating that was big on physical payoff but short on substance. In contrast, the OkCupid experience was designed to allow potential daters the chance to find out as much as possible about their match, revealing the person behind the profile.

W+K made OkCupid the champion of dating with depth, while also reflecting the issues and passions that our audience cares about, by creating a campaign that subverted a popular modern dating acronym “DTF”. While in popular parlance that “F” cuts to one very specific chase, we used the F and the phrase to showcase the personality of dating profiles, while not-so-subtly confronting the other “hook-up first, questions later,” apps.

We turned the substance behind OkCupid user profiles—like an interest in pottery or and opinion about politics–into something desirable, fun and sexy. The painfully obvious “Down To Fuck” became the joyfully surprising “Down To Fire Up The Kiln”, “Down to Farmers Market”, or “Down to Four Twenty”. The campaign changed the conversation about dating culture and empowered each individual to interpret DTF in a way that reflects what they want from dating.